Paul Kershaw, Mario Canseco, Renee Merrifield and Shreya Saxena are part of UBC Okanagan Debates: Are we leaving a better world for the next generation?
Renee Merrifield has spent her career building in Kelowna. Family, homes, a company and a political career.
She’s bringing those same instincts to UBC Okanagan Debates, arguing “yes” to the question: Are we leaving a better world for the next generation?
“My optimism comes from knowing how my grandparents lived, how my parents lived, how I’ve lived, and the opportunities that my children are afforded,” says Merrifield, CEO of Troika Developments, the Western Canadian real estate company she started in Kelowna in the late 1990s.
Merrifield and UBC Okanagan alumna Shreya Saxena are the optimists. They’re facing Generation Squeeze founder Paul Kershaw and Research Co. president Mario Canseco.
Kershaw and Merrifield tangled on the topic during Merrifield’s term as BC United MLA for Kelowna-Mission.
She doesn’t need numbers as proof. She has experience.
It starts with her grandparents. One grandmother was widowed young; left with six children and a farm she wasn’t legally allowed to hold a loan against, she put the mortgage in her teenage son’s name.
“My life was not possible in my grandparents’ era,” Merrifield says. “Women could not have a credit rating independent of a man and could not build businesses the way that I have been able to.”
That contrast is the case she plans to make at the debate: not that today’s problems aren’t real, but that the arc, measured across generations, curves upward.
She points to her five children, aged 24 to 30, three her own and two stepchildren, who she says have educations, careers and choices her grandparents never had.
Merrifield isn’t interested in pretending the case is airtight.
“I hope that in the debate, we get to the heart of the issues, that we dispel some of the myths of it being about perfection,” she says, “and that we get to where it should be, which is about being better.”
Her debate partner makes a version of the same argument from the other end of the age gap. Saxena came to UBC Okanagan from Delhi, India, in 2021.
An engineer and entrepreneur, she founded the UBCO AI Club. Her research spans machine learning, satellite systems and wildfire risk prediction, work she took up after living through an evacuation herself.
Where older generations see a housing market young people can’t crack, Saxena sees a generation making different choices on purpose.
“We picked mobility over a mortgage,” she says. “Owning a home that young was never the only definition of a good life.”
She’s equally direct about what her generation gets wrong, and what gets wrongly said about it.
“We’re not naïve about how hard things are,” she says. “We just refuse to treat the same hard problems as impossible to solve.”
The one criticism she accepts is Gen Z’s impatience, a trait she’d rather have than its opposite.
“Yes, we’re impatient,” she admits. “But I’d rather be impatient with the problems that need solving than comfortable with the ones that don’t get solved. The world is on a trajectory to be better, and impatience is just wanting to be part of that.”
Nathan Skolski, UBC Okanagan’s Director of Public Affairs, will moderate the debate.
UBC Okanagan Debates runs Wednesday, September 16, 6:30 to 8 pm, at Kelowna Community Theatre.
